Client
The Redstone Strategy Group, a consultancy helping solve urgent social problems.
Situation
Redstone has developed a quantitative framework to help foundations choose where to invest philanthropic dollars. As they refined their framework, they started by collecting all of their quantitative data on paper and in Excel workbooks custom-built for each foundation they were advising.
Then, with a solid approach in hand, Redstone turned to Dayspring to convert their forward-thinking framework into an online tool that makes it easy for experts to give their input on different factors that affect whether advocacy succeeds, and ultimately see what’s worth investing in and what’s not.
Execution
We guided the Redstone leadership team through a discovery/design process to set a solid foundation for the project.
Different groups of people would be using this online tool, and we dug deep to discover and understand their unique needs. An expert offering their opinion on a single initiative and an executive director of an NGO responsible for an entire portfolio of initiatives were just a few of the people we needed to keep in mind as we moved forward. From this place of empathy and understanding, we crafted easy-to-use interfaces.
The framework Redstone created can be used as a checklist, rubric, and a quantitative estimator. These different approaches were built into the tool to make it flexible for a variety of different client scenarios. For those who lean more towards going with their gut, the tool can assist as a checklist of what to take into account during the decision process. For those with a bent towards data-driven decisions, the quantitative estimator does a lot of hardcore math in the background to give insight into the best path to take. Redstone consultants can utilize the tool’s flexibility to best meet the needs of a particular client’s situation.
We also incorporated elements to the survey page to make it feel like a game and encourage people to make it all the way to the end. Some of the features we implemented included immediately updating calculations as the user enters data into the survey, slider-based entry, and a progress bar.
Redstone partners with foundations to do things like develop a strategy for averting global climate change, conserve the Great Bear Rainforest, and rebuild America’s fisheries. We’re overjoyed to have contributed some tech savvy to their world-changing work.